by Chaim Potok
The subsequent brutal effort by Stalin once and for all to eradicate Jewish culture inside the Soviet Union was the absolute reverse of—and, ironically, was to a large extent fueled by—the foreign policy of the Soviet Union toward the new state of Israel.
Official Soviet policy after the war was heavily in favor of the nascent Jewish state and opposed to the presence of the British in the Middle East—even to the point of helping the new state acquire weapons it desperately needed in its war against invading Arab armies. In September 1948, Golda Meir, Israel’s first ambassador to the Soviet Union, traveled to Russia and appeared in Moscow on the Jewish New Year. A vast crowd of Jews greeted her outside the synagogue, across the street from the school Volodya had once attended. She was surrounded and applauded. Militiamen ringed the crowd, and security police were everywhere, but they did not interfere. Astonishingly, from the crowd came a sudden cry in Hebrew: “The Jewish people lives!” Men and women wept with joy.
Stalin was confounded by that crowd, and raged at the Jewish nationalism he had thought long dead, perceiving it as an open threat to his power. Let one national group rear its head, others would soon follow, and anarchy ensue.
In November of that year, security police agents burst into the printing plant of the last Yiddish publishing house in the Soviet Union and disconnected the new linotype machines while they were running. Strongin, the director, and Belenky, the chief editor, were present, along with workers. A terrible silence suddenly filled the plant. “Your publishing house is closed down!” shouted one of the agents.
And at the end of 1948 the government ended the life of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee. Nearly all its leaders, including Itzik Fefer, ardent Communist and colonel in the Red Army, were arrested.
Arrested too were the poets Peretz Markish and Itzik Kipnis, the writers David Bergelson, Borukh Veisman, Moshe Notovich, Leib Kvitko. Articles began to appear in Pravda condemning “cosmopolitanism” in literature, the arts, music, scholarship. Of the writers, artists, and scholars singled out for criticism in the press, 70 percent were Jews.
Newspapers in all the Soviet republics trumpeted against “men with no background,” “rootless cosmopolitans,” “vagabonds without passports,” “renegades foreign to Russia,” individuals who had no grasp of the history and poetry of Russia, of the Russian soul—and everyone understood that these epithets were directed against the Jews, who were purported to lack deep feelings for the land of Russia and the Soviet way of life. Members of the erstwhile Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee were now declared to have been agents of American Zionism, plotting to create a Jewish state in the Crimea with the intent of using it to establish a bridgehead for American imperialism, a threat to the very heart of the Soviet Union. Jewish schools were closed. A tense incipient pogrom atmosphere pervaded much of the land. Jewish children were attacked in Russian schools. It became dangerous for Jews to walk the streets. Jews began to lose their jobs. To protect themselves, some Jews burned their Jewish books and broke off all contact with Jewish relatives and friends overseas.
In all, about four hundred Jewish writers and artists were arrested and exiled. One could never say with certainty that Stalin’s fury was directed only against the Jews; always a few non-Jews, too, would be arrested, exiled, shot. With the termination of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee and the wholesale loss of Jewish writers and artists, there came to an end any open and effective Jewish culture in the Soviet Union.
Mysteriously, as in the purges of the thirties, Solomon Slepak escaped arrest. But this time he did not slip away entirely unscathed. Close friends in the Regional Party Committee and the Moscow Party Committee informed him that he would soon be dismissed from the publishing house. The reason? He was a Jew. And if that weren’t grounds enough, his having lived so many years abroad was now of itself sufficiently strong cause for job termination. There was nothing they could do for him, his friends said, except request that he be given a party pension because of his service in the Bolshevik cause during the Civil War, even though he was not yet of pension age.
In October 1950, Solomon Slepak—dedicated Old Bolshevik, esteemed editor and translator, noted writer of articles for Izvestia and Pravda under the pseudonym M. Osipov, lecturer on international affairs of the Moscow Party Committee—was abruptly discharged from his position at the publishing house.
He received the pension and lived for nearly three more decades, writing, lecturing, translating. But his effective role as a player in the center of power had come to an end.
THE SON
4
The Enemy Within
At about the same time that Solomon’s life as a career Communist was concluding, Volodya, having graduated from the Aviation Institute in June 1950 in the top half of his class with a master’s degree in radio electronics, began to look for a job.
He applied to factories and institutes. The standard application form contained more than one hundred questions, among them: Have you any relatives abroad? Did you or any close member of your family ever live abroad? What was the nationality of your grandparents? Were you or your parents or grandparents members of any party other than the Bolshevik Party before the Revolution? Have you ever had any doubts concerning the policies of the Communist Party?
On his internal passport, his identity card, the line that revealed his nationality read, in Russian, Evrei. Jew.
For months Volodya went searching for a job. After handing in each completed application, he would wait two or three days and then call, only to be told that his services were not needed. He applied about a dozen times. Few who turned him away made any effort to hide the reasons for his being rejected. Volodya Slepak, son of Solomon Slepak, after six years in one of the leading scientific institutes in the Soviet Union and with a master’s degree in radio engineering, was finding it impossible to get a job because during his childhood he had lived abroad, and because he was a Jew.
He told his parents often of his fruitless efforts. His mother commiserated and urged him to keep trying. His father said, “This is happening because there are many traitors and spies among Jews, especially with those who were abroad. Now our country is surrounded by enemies, we must build communism alone, and the party hasn’t the time to check everybody. So they don’t accept Jews into positions that are important to the state. Later, after careful investigation, everyone who is innocent will be given a job according to his education and knowledge.”
Volodya unhesitatingly accepted his father’s explanation. After failing for months to find work in the field of radio engineering, he took a job as a television repairman in a shop on Gorokhovsky Street in a Moscow neighborhood near the Kursky Railroad Station. The manager of the shop was a Jew.
In those days a television set cost approximately 500 rubles (five months’ salary), the equivalent of about $250. The sets were the size of a microwave oven, with a rectangular fourteen-inch black-and-white screen. The box was of polished brown wood; the pictures were of poor quality. In the 1950s there was one television station in the Soviet Union and a wait of about five months for a set. If you lived in Moscow and your set suddenly no longer worked, you brought it to one of the five or six television repair shops in the city.
The shop in which Volodya worked consisted of a hallway and two rooms, each about two hundred square feet in size, with large windows, workbenches, and shelves along the walls. Into the shop one day walked one of Volodya’s friends, who had been his classmate in the Aviation Institute, accompanied by a young woman. The friend had been visiting a woman named Rita and her cousin Masha. Rita had asked him to look at her television set, which wasn’t working. It turned out that one of the tubes needed to be replaced, but a new tube could not be found in a regular shop, said the friend, because of the shortage of television parts. There was, however, this repair shop where he knew one of the workers, who might be able to get his hands on a new tube. He could go and be back in an hour. Did Masha want to accompany him?
She wore a kn
itted white and black wool hat and a beige sheepskin coat. Her skin was smooth, her face roundish, her eyes brown and alert behind glasses. She was in her fourth year in the medical institute in Ryazan, a town 125 miles to the southeast, and in Moscow for the weekend to visit her family.
As soon as his old classmate had left the television repair shop with Masha and a new tube, Volodya telephoned Rita and said that he wanted to come over and visit her next Saturday, and could she also invite her cousin Masha?
That Saturday Volodya met Masha again, in Rita’s apartment. This time Masha’s aunt was present, and they all had tea. Later he said he would walk Masha home. Her family lived not too far away in an apartment building in the center of the city, near the Moscow synagogue. It was February and very cold. They walked together for several hours.
Volodya has no clear memory of what they talked about; probably, he thinks, her studies in medical school, books they had read, concerts they had attended. Vaguely he recalls an attempt to explain why he was working as a repairman—a brief, guarded remark about anti-Semitism in the field of engineering—but he is not certain whether that happened then or later in their relationship. They did not discuss Israel or politics.
Her name was Maria Rashkovsky (in Russian, Rashkovskaya); her mother’s name, Bertha. The chronicles record her fear of remembering too much. “I wish I knew more about my family than I do now,” she tells us. “But there is nobody to ask. Before, it was dangerous for children to know, they could blurt it out. After the Revolution, people tried to conceal their past, bury it as deep as they could. I remember my mother filling out application forms, many pages, gray-colored paper. She would answer the question ‘What class are you from?’ with the words ‘petty bourgeois’ or ‘lower middle class.’ That terrifying question was on the first page of every application—for an apartment, a school, a job. Also: ‘What parties did you belong to before 1917?’ ‘What views did you have?’ The applications would stick to you all your life. So my mother tried to conceal as much as she could. Many things are gone with my mother.”
Despite that, Masha’s astonishingly retentive memory is rich in specificity and abundant with details. She remembers vividly her father, Sanya. A handsome stocky man, five feet seven inches in height, brown straight hair, his face smooth, close-shaven, glistening in the morning and bluish with beard by evening. He was born in Tiraspol into an assimilated family that had abandoned Jewish observance a generation earlier. He grew up in Odessa, served in the Red Cavalry during the Civil War, and rose to the rank of captain. After the war he settled in Moscow, where he met and married Bertha. Self-educated, well read, a devotee of opera, and the life of any party. His work in a secondhand bookstore and later in a government publishing house enabled him to indulge his passion for books. He owned a collection of about eight hundred rare leather-bound books printed before the Revolution: Boccaccio, Daudet, Flaubert, Balzac, Zola, Hugo, Shakespeare, Swift, Voltaire, Defoe, Maupassant, Pushkin, Gogol, Lermontov, Turgenev, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Nekrasov. He loved the books, loved the smell and feel of them. He read them, knew the provenance of each. At his place of work he was able to remember the history of every book that came into his hands: the year of publication; where and by whom published; how many editions; the number of copies printed. He taught Masha to read and write and count long before she began to attend school; the first book she read on her own, in Russian, was Little Red Riding Hood. A short-tempered man, he once found Masha bending the corner of a page to mark her place in a book and shouted, “How dare you treat a book that way? It’s so low, only uneducated people do such a thing. Do you know how many people labored to create this one book?”
Masha was born in Moscow on November 7, 1926, the ninth anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution. Friends said to her parents, “You must name her Octyabrina in honor of the October Revolution.” People were still euphoric about the Revolution, about the future; they gave their children names like Tractor and Industriya. Her father said she should really be named after her grandmother Miriam, but there were reasons not to choose a name like that. In tsarist times the Russians had been contemptuous of the Jews; now they feared and hated them, blamed the Revolution on them, saw them as conspiring to destroy the entire Christian world. And it was true that a few thousand Jews, sickened to blinding rage by tsarist oppression, had thrown away the very last marks of their Jewishness, joined the Bolshevik Party, and helped to make the Revolution. For them and all the other new leaders of Russia, the name Miriam was too Jewish. So Sanya and Bertha Rashkovsky named the child Maria, and at home called her Musya or Manya. It was Volodya who began to call her Masha.
Masha was the firstborn; then, five years later, came a boy, named Zinovy and called Zalya; and, afterward, a second daughter, named Henrietta and called Gera.
Sanya Rashkovsky left the care of the children and the house in the hands of his wife, whose cooking was a source of enormous pleasure to him. A supper of lamb stew and chicken soup with noodles: He would wrinkle his nose at the smells, rub his hands together with delight. He loved sweets, often told Masha tales of a mountain outside Odessa, a fantasy mountain of halvah, describing it so vividly she could taste its rich, honeyed sweetness. Cut flowers dismayed him. “Flowers die the instant you cut them,” he said to Masha. “How can one gain pleasure from something that is dead?”
In the early 1930s he became ill with tuberculosis and spent the last months of his life in a sanitarium located in an evergreen forest outside Moscow. One month before he died, Masha and her mother visited him. Ten-year-old Masha could not recognize the wasted figure they said was her father. He was dying of starvation, slowly melting into death, unable to eat because of the searing pain in his intestines.
He died on January 17, 1937, and was buried three days later. Many attended the funeral. Masha watched the coffin being lowered into the ground and suddenly threw herself forward to halt its terrifying descent, screaming, “Daddy! Daddy!” Her uncle pulled her back. The chronicles record her comment: “My childhood was over.”
Masha’s mother was born in a small town on the Dnieper River in the Ukraine into a family of devout Jews. Her father, barely eking out a living as a maker of leather goods—belts, saddles, bridles—was at the same time a judge in the local Jewish religious court, a man so highly respected that the Ukrainians would often appear before him, requesting that he settle their differences. During the pogroms of 1903-1905 and the Civil War, Ukrainians tried to protect the family from Cossacks. Masha’s grandmother bore across her face a long scar left by a mounted Cossack wielding a metal-tipped whip.
In the early 1930s Masha’s parents took the children on visits to the grandparents, and Masha remembers Jewish folk prints on the walls and the warm smells of special foods for Sabbaths and festivals. Her grandmother lit candles on Friday evenings; her grandfather conducted the Passover Seder. The family gathered around the big dinner table for the Sabbath. At the head sat her grandfather; next to him his mother, Baba Malka; on the other side, his wife; then his children and grandchildren. Each knew exactly his or her place at the table. Then the blessing over the wine, the washing of the hands, the blessing over the bread, the scents, the food, the Sabbath songs, the Grace After Meals. She still remembers all those visits to the grandparents. And standing in the road alone one day in front of her grandparents’ house, spinning her arms, and her grandfather calling out in Yiddish—he also spoke Ukrainian but could barely read Russian—“Hey, windmill, stop spinning your arms, you haven’t gained a gram of fat, what am I going to tell your mother?”
Her mother had left her parents’ home in the early 1920s, gone off to Moscow, lived under horrific conditions in a place called Hotel Chicago. She attended the School for Higher Education for Women, where she received a teacher’s diploma, the equivalent of a university degree, with a specialty in preschool education. The winter of 1924 was especially severe in Moscow. On the day of Lenins funeral she stood patiently in line with the tens of thousands who had come to v
iew Lenin in his open coffin, to pay their respects to the leader of the Revolution. One of the guards near the coffin came over to her and said quietly that one side of her face looked severely frostbitten, she should tend to it immediately.
After her marriage to Sanya in January 1926, she ran one of the most successful kindergartens in Moscow, and Mashas very first memory is of sitting in her mother’s classroom at the age of three, and watching her show flash cards about Lenin and Stalin and the Revolution. She remembers one evening her father sitting in his chair reading Pravda and suddenly saying in disgust, “What sort of newspaper is this, four pages of nothing, do you know what an English newspaper has?” and her mother looking around nervously and whispering, “Sanya, be still, the walls have ears.” Masha was five. They lived in one room of a two-room apartment on Pokrovka Street near the Kremlin, directly under the slanting roof of a two-story pre-Revolution house. In the other, smaller room were two elderly men, factory workers. She remembers the fear on her mother’s face when she said that: “The walls have ears.”
The school authorities asked her mother to join the party, and she talked about it with her husband, who said that if she joined she would need to attend meetings and would have less time with the children, so she declined the invitation. Years later she told Masha that by not joining, she had probably saved herself, because had she joined she would have risen in the ranks, and all the high party members among her colleagues were arrested and shot.
The links to her family in the Ukraine wore thin through the thirties. Her father’s leather shop was taken over by Communists, and in 1939 he died of a heart attack. The rest of the family disappeared into the storm of war.